The popular Kaspersky Anti-Virus suite appears to have had its source code leaked online to torrent and file sharing sites. According to the description of the leak, the source code was stolen from the Kaspersky labs back in 2008 by a former employee who, according to Softpedia, had access to the code. The former employee had originally offered to sell the source code on the black market, but was jailed for three years for stealing intellectual property.

The stolen source code reveals information such as the anti-virus engine, anti-phishing, anti-dialer, anti-spam, parental control and other important modules for the anti-virus program. Kasperky states that none of the source code that has leaked poses any threat to the security of its current desktop client. It contains only a portion of the program and since the release of the source code most of the core modules for the anti-virus program have all been updated or rewritten. Though the code is about three years old this would without doubt be a valuable asset and inspiration for malware and virus programmers as Kaspersky holds about 5% of the anti-virus market share.

Kaspersky has since contacted a website over the leak [Russian], but is yet to release a statement to the public on its website. It's rumored that Kaspersky actually knew about the leak of the source code, as far back as November last year.